12/30/2015

This is a year in which Fifty Shades of Grey came out,
and yet, nothing from that trashbox Twilight fan-fiction movie makes it on this
list of the best onscreen sex scenes of 2015! No, this is a year that saw far
better sensual moments onscreen than anything Anastasia Steele and Christian
Grey (THOSE NAMES! I still cannot with the hilarious fakeness of those
character names) had to offer. It was a great year for film, and among so many
amazing movies – you did read our best movies of 2015 list, right? – there were
kisses and sex scenes that probably set you aflutter in the theater.

So, no more foreplay – here is the best of the best.

5. BROOKLYN

How often do we actually get a realistic sex scene in
film? An honest losing-your-virginity moment? Rarely, but Brooklyn did that
experience justice with its first encounter between the newly married Eilis
(Saoirse Ronan) and Tony (Emory Cohen). They’ve kissed before then, they’ve
seen each other in bathing suits at the beach, but this is the first night together, and it’s
fumbling and awkward and passionate and excited. It’s over faster than you
would expect, but there’s realism in that, and in how Eilis and Tony hold each
other afterward, and kiss each other goodbye the next morning as she returns to
Ireland for her sister’s funeral. That is some real, people-falling-in-love shit,
and it worked beautifully with the rest of the film’s frankness about growing
up.

4. CREED

Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) and Bianca (Tessa Thompson)
don’t get off on the right foot in Creed. But after a couple of dates, after
shared cheesesteaks and discussing their dreams and plans for the future, the
two start falling for each other. And there’s an intimacy in how they act
around each other that underlines Adonis’s admission that he feels like he’s
known her his whole life – it’s evident in their first kiss onscreen, laying on
the floor together, looking into each other’s eyes, inching closer together
until their lips finally meet. It’s a great, true moment, one that fills you
with fuzzies and joy and hope about what they could become together. The film
has an OK PG-13 sex scene later on, but it’s that first kiss – relatively tame,
but emotionally fueled – that resonates.

3. THE LONGEST RIDE

The pure-man-candy portion of this list begins with The
Longest Ride, which was not a particularly good movie – I mean, it was Nicholas
Sparks and it wasn’t The Notebook, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t
know already – but which had the shockingly attractive Scott Eastwood. This
movie worships Eastwood, and it shoots him like a god – bathing him in golden
light practically all the time, lingering on his physique, and making him look
as hella attractive as possible. Eastwood has never looked this good, and those shower sex scenes with Britt Robertson have this frenzied passion that
really sells their unlikely romance. I mean, he’s a cowboy and she likes art! HOW
WILL THEY EVER MAKE IT? (Maybe they’ll just have a lot of sex to work through
it. That’s kind of the only appeal of Eastwood in this movie, honestly. THAT
CHEST.)

2. THE MAN FROM UNCLE

The Man from UNCLE flopped this summer, which is a
bummer; it was my most underrated movie of the year. Practically no one saw Guy
Ritchie’s extremely stylish and fun spy movie, which means that they missed the
hilariously weird, impressively effective seduction scene between Armie Hammer
and Alicia Vikander. He’s a Russian spy bordering on crazy; she’s the daughter
of a Nazi scientist he’s tasked with protecting; their height difference is
like two solid feet. But there’s this scene where they start out dancing, and
then that devolves into a fistfight, and eventually they’re wrestling on the
floor and there’s more sexual tension in the air than in practically any other
movie this year. By the time they’re leaning in for a kiss, you want with EVERY
FIBER OF YOUR BEING for their extremely mismatched body sizes to get it on! And
then, because Ritchie is a jerk, he veers the scene in a different direction
and the smooth never happens. But the potential for what could have been is
strong – it’s an undercurrent of sexuality that keeps The Man from UNCLE on its
toes.

1. MAGIC MIKE XXL

I’m sorry, did you really think this list wasn’t going to
include Big Dick Richie’s “I Want It That Way” dance? Because THAT HAPPENED,
and it was the best sexy thing to happen onscreen this year.

Women died of thirst in
the theater, and then were revived when they remembered Channing Tatum was the
star of this movie, and then were given new life goals when Jada Pinkett Smith
appeared onscreen. Magic Mike XXL underperformed in comparison with its
predecessor, but may it have a long and healthy life on home video. Big Dick Richie
didn’t do all this work for nothing.

And just in case you wanted to remember the worst of the
year:

3. JUPITER ASCENDING

Yup, one Channing Tatum movie led the best of the year, and
one appears on the worst. Because that love story between him and Mila Kunis?
Yuck. Their chemistry was off, the whole thing was weird, and that Kunis line “I’ve
always loved dogs” was just gross. Jupiter Ascending wasn’t as awful as people
say, but the ultra-forced love story was certainly its worst part.

2. PIXELS

Did you forget that in this movie, Josh Gad’s character
has sex with an alien that looks like Q*Bert, because it can also transform itself
into looking like Ashley Benson, who he wanted to capture earlier in the movie
as a “trophy”? Because I will never forget that, and it is goddamn disgusting.

1. THE COBBLER

In this hellscape of a movie, Adam Sandler plays a pathetic Jewish
guy who has a magical stitching machine that lets him turn into the person
whose shoes he puts on. So he puts on the shoes of minority men, turns into
them, and then has sex with unsuspecting women.